Saturday, 24 February 2018

Finished: 15mm Ming Chinese Anti-Cavalry Unit

Despite being slowed down by the 'flu, the fact that I was at home sick rather than just painting in the evenings has seen me complete the last of my current units for the Ming Chinese army (there will be a few more in the future).

I had bought a pack of infantry with shields by mistake, but realised that I could in fact make use of them. For ADLG they will be heavy infantry swordsmen and for FoGAM they will be heavy infantry "anti-cavalry squads" - there are no heavy foot for the Ming Chinese in FoGR.

This is how they would normally be deployed:

And a close-up to show off the freehand shields:

The officer has the symbols for "wolf" on his shield. The troopers have "demon faces" which were added with a micron pen which is meant to be waterproof - just as well I did a test with brushing on Klear and gloss varnish before doing my usual Klear/ink coat as the ink turned out not to be waterproof after all. To avoid ruining all that hard work I airbrushed them with Vallejo gloss varnish which didn't cause the ink to run before applying the Klear/ink coat.

And the army so far:

There will be a "workbench" post tomorrow where you will find out what I'm moving onto next, but it probably won't be until later in the week that the next finished unit appears (possibly even next weekend).

@ Whisk - thanks Ivy! I seem to be over it now - was back at work today :)

@ anon - no problem and thanks for the link and your appreciation of my painting. Although the "demon face" shields shown on that page may be the ones in artwork or surviving examples, they look to be very intricate designs and probably wouldn't have been present on the shields of the masses of infantry but rather on the shields of officers and nobles. I figure that the bulk of the troops would have painted crude imitations on their own shields, such as the ones that I've done :)

Hello there. I saw a link to my blog popping up, so I figure I should come over and say hi =D.

On the topic of shield - ancient people were actually pretty into shield decorations, particularly as some sort of good luck charm (soldiers tend to be superstitious). Their skill might be crude, but they usually still spend some time and effort to paint it.

Undecorated Chinese shield should be best left with original wood colour/texture. Chinese in particular would avoid too much white colour due to its association with death, mourning and funeral (thus bad luck).

Thanks for stopping by - your blog looks as though it's a very useful source and I wish I'd come across it before I'd started painting my army, but it's too late now.I didn't know that about white being associated with death; something to keep in mind for future additions to my army. As for the shields, it sounds as though I may have been better going with my other option which was to paint the symbols for "wolf" on them, as with the officers' shields.Once again, thanks for stopping by to say hello and make some useful comments. And please accept my humble apologies for my inaccuracies.

BTW, the so-called "demon head" are actually stylized (or just simply bad paintjob) dragon or tiger, depending on the details. Tiger is a common Chinese shield motif, as pronunciation for "Tiger" and "Protect" are similar in Chiense language.

I also do Imjin war at 15mm and the lack of Ming figures as well as accurate information is extremely problematic. This guy got so annoyed with the lack of Ming dynasty models he started making his own at 1/72 scale: http://bennosfiguresforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=18191&hilit=ming

I know you said this force is basically finished but, would you consider adding some units of handgunners?

My long-term plan is to do the Japanese forces for the Imjin war as well. the lack of Ming and Korean figures in 15mm is annoying - just OG15s and Grumpy that I could find.

I think I've seen pics of the greens for those 1/72 scale figures on TMP - they do look great.

I will be adding handgunner units at some point, but wasn't keen on the OG15s figures. I will probably go for the Grumpy's figures but it seems that I will need to order them from Eureka - hopefully I'm not too late to put in an order for collection at Salute to avoid postage costs from Australia to UK.